What lay beneath David Lynch’s unique approach to cinema?
A moldy, severed ear on a patch of suburban grass, filled with crawling ants. The head of an adult human sheared off and replaced by the visage of a grotesque baby alien. An extra-dimensional room fully curtained in red, inhabited by a giant, a dwarf, a cluster of nerves, and a dead girl.
David Lynch’s filmography revelled in the evocative strangeness of images like this. The avant-garde director, actor, composer, and painter passed away last week at the age of 78 due to emphysema from years of smoking.

His trademark deviation from Hollywood storytelling, via surreal imagery that disrupted the spatial and temporal universe of a film or television series, proved to be so uniquely influential that this style garnered the title of “Lynchian”.
The flavour of his craft came from his belief in putting forth an uncompromised vision that he, very famously, would not explain. “People have a yearning to make an intellectual sense of (cinema). And when they can’t do that, it feels frustrating, but they can come up with an explanation from within if they just allow it… What something is and what something isn’t, and they might agree with their friends or argue with their friends. But how could they agree or argue if they don’t already know it?” he wrote in his autobiography, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity.

David Lynch, center, poses with actors Laura Elena Harring, left, and Naomi Watts, from his film ‘Mulholland Drive’
| Photo Credit:
AP
Evoking empathy
His work demanded from his audience the process of feeling, rather than understanding. His use of silence, words, sound design, and colour came together with the intention of evoking an experience specific to each member of his audience. In worlds of incomprehension, with few rational, linear, or coherent conclusions to be drawn, empathy was the most easily accessible component of Lynch’s art.
Lynch pioneered surrealist cinema in Hollywood, an art movement that has, since its inception in the 1920s, deified the female and reduced her to a mysterious object of desire, a canvas to project ideas and thought-provoking visuals onto (see: Hans Bellmer’s The Doll), rather than beings with inner complexities that deserve to be explored in their own right.

Lynch does not necessarily fall into this category. Mulholland Drive, widely regarded as his magnum opus, is at its surface a neo-noir about an amnesiac woman, Rita (played by Laura Harring), falling in love with Betty (played by Naomi Watts), another woman who is helping her solve the mystery of who she is. An hour into the runtime, and perhaps two hours into mulling over the film’s ending, leads to a general conclusion that the film portrays the fractured psyche of a woman traumatised by the structural inner workings of Hollywood and the effects of sexual abuse via the casting couch.

Naomi Watts and Laura Harring as Betty and Rita in a still from ‘Mulholland Drive’
In a scene now famous for its disturbing implications, a frazzled, more human Betty, who is in a different realm, identified as Diane Selwyn, sits on a couch and pleasures herself while profusely sobbing. The scene can be interpreted as a representation of women’s complicated relationship with pleasure, especially in a space such as Hollywood, where the #MeToo movement in 2017 solidified that opportunities are withheld from actresses in exchange for sexual favours.
Watts’ performance invokes pain and confusion in the viewer, while the story directs attention to an unavoidable struggle of presenting oneself as feminine; how much of one’s sexuality is one’s own choice? The blonde-brunette pairing of Watts and Harring, who is interpreted as a part of Diane’s psyche, represents an internal Madonna-whore complex.

Lynch’s empathetic lens on women allows him to deploy recognisable tropes without shoehorning a woman’s personhood into them. Blue Velvet’s Dorothy Vallens (played by Isabella Rossellini) is, at first glance, a typical damsel in distress; a battered woman abused by her deranged husband. And yet, when she encounters Jeffrey Beaumont (played by Kyle Maclachlan), she pulls a knife on him and forces him to hit her and submit to her.
In 1986, when this film came out, this depiction of Vallens was famously bashed as misogynistic by veteran film critic, Roger Ebert. “…when you ask an actress to endure those experiences, you should keep your side of the bargain by putting her in an important film,” he remarked in his review.

Isabella Rossellini as Dorothy Vallens in a still from ‘Blue Velvet’
In hindsight, however, both the female leads in the film, the brunette Vallens and the blonde Sandy (played by Laura Dern), are postmodern parodies critiquing the two tropes into which women are categorised; the quintessential good girl, Sandy is overtly sweet and inexperienced, while Vallens is an emulation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, seemingly sexually empowered because she wants her subjugation.
Vallens is a reflection of the trauma endured by women who are driven towards sexual acts of self-destruction and an astute look into the complexities of sexual dynamics between genders.
Dissecting womanhood
Lynch’s most extensive expansion of a woman’s personhood, undoubtedly, can be found in his deeply influential collaboration with Mark Foster, Twin Peaks. The television series, whose first two seasons aired in 1990, was one of the first works to inject auteur directing into mainstream television. The show is driven by the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer (played by Sheryl Lee) and, as it is unraveled, the audience is further exposed to the person underneath the poised dead body that washed ashore in this small town, the homecoming queen tragically robbed of her youth.
Laura is seen as the perfect girl-next-door by the people of Twin Peaks, the ideal of American girlhood. As the episodes go by, we see her self-destructive escapades and tumultuous relationships with her mother, best friend, boyfriend, secret boyfriend, and cocaine. Lynch once again breaks apart the rosy image of American suburbia, this time with a sharp focus on the nuclear family. Laura was a victim of incest perpetuated by her father Leland (played by Ray Wise), and is portrayed as such; a victim. While Lynch and Foster do foray into glamourising her destructive tendencies with strobe lights and nudity, they ultimately attribute said tendencies to her father’s abuse.

Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer and Kyle Maclachlan as Dale Cooper in a still from ‘Twin Peaks’
Here, empathy is imparted to these characters with a delicate nuance. Leland, as it turns out, was also sexually abused by his grandfather. While this explains his perpetuation of the same abuse, it does not, by any means, justify it. Leland is still portrayed as the devil incarnate, and is revealed to be the culprit.
In the final scene of the spinoff film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which depicts Laura’s last day on earth, Laura, now dead, is seen in the red room, a realm frequented by various characters of the show from time to time. She is visited by an angel and begins to smile widely as she weeps heavily, with a sense of relief. The detective who unravelled the mystery, Dale Cooper (played again by Kyle Maclahlan), stands beside her, hand on her shoulder, a vision of empathy, not truly understanding, but understanding.

In a turbulent world of sexual abuse, constant objectification, a flattening of personhood into archetype, death was the highest act of kindness that Lynch could bequeath upon his most polarising starlet.
Published – January 24, 2025 02:28 pm IST
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